Buying yarn on Amazon

So Jejune tipped me off that Amazon sells yarn, and not just the dishcloth cotton I found last time I looked. Since I have an Amazon credit card that gives me back 3% on Amazon purchases, I thought I’d go see what was available and how it compares to other retailers. Here are some of my discoveries:

Item	Amazon’s price	MSRP or competing price
Joseph Galler Belangor Angora Yarn	$9.95 (this is being sold by a fly fishing company for tying flies!)	$12 at Purl Soho
Cascade Fixation	$4.49	$4.60 MSRP
Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock	$9.99	$10.00 MSRP
Lorna’s Laces Helen’s Lace	$49.95	$48.00 MSRP
Cascade 220	$5.99	$6.60 MSRP
Cascade 220 Superwash	$9.49	$9.80 at Jimmy Bean’s
Misti Alpaca Laceweight	$6.99	$7.20 at WEBS

Spurred on by curiosity about the Belangor angora, I also looked up worm binders, which people on Ravelry were suggesting as an alternative to circular needle binders. Here’s one that looks nice. $15 for 10 ziploc pouches, 8.5 x 4″.

I’m also tempted by this 12 sets of 5 bamboo DPNs, sizes US 1-11, for $19.99.

Maybe I’ll post some more if I get inspired to do any more research. As she mentions, though, you can find good stuff in general if you search for Lorna’s Laces, Cascade, Misti, Catalina, or AlpacaDirect. Or heck, just “yarn” will work, too. Jo-Ann Fabrics sells stuff through Amazon as well, like the cheapo ball winders, but the prices are the same as if you order directly from Jo-Ann–plus you can often find coupons for free shipping or 40% off for Jo-Ann.

Wrapped up in books

I have tons of exciting stuff to post about and I don’t know where to start! I guess I’ll leave the baby blanket and exciting package for later and for now, post about 2 things:

One. Norwegian purling is just about the coolest thing ever. Kalani taught it to me last night at knitting night and I was so excited about it! It was like magic! I felt like a baby watching the finger trick. ZOMG WOW LOL!1!!! (cause that’s what babies say when they’re amazed.)

Two. Hilary at The Yarniad tagged me with a fun book meme. I share the same problem as her–lots of my favorite books have been favorites for a long time. I seldom discover a new book I really love; I tend to enjoy them briefly, then kind of forget about them. Sometimes I can’t remember a single thing about them. For example, we had this discussion about Gregory Maguire books last night. I knew I’d read at least one of his books other than Wicked but could not tell you for the life of me which one it was. I can’t really tell you anything about Wicked, either. There was something in it about a witch or something. Or maybe some stepsisters? Yeah.

1. What book are you currently reading?
Here are the three I’m currently reading. One is in the living room, one is in the bathroom, and one is by the bed.

1. Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Eating Alone. An excellent collection of essays running the gamut from depressing (the one I’m currently reading has a woman telling tales of how she was well rid of her snobby gourmand ex-husband, who used to wag his finger at her in restaurants to get her to take her hand off the bowl of the wineglass and hold it properly, by the stem) to hilarious (an extended recipe for a delicious-sounding grill-curried shrimp quesarito with avocado raita that includes the line “I’d love to escort you to the Oscars, Paris, but I’ve got a lot of shucking to do.”)

2. No Sweetness Here. This book is for my book club (we still haven’t met!) and I still haven’t finished it. It’s a collection of short stories about life in Ghana, and it makes me feel kind of uncultured and boorish, because in some of the stories, I’m having a terrible time figuring out what’s going on, and then once I’ve figured that out, I can’t figure out what the point of the story is. My mind keeps wandering. It’s probably making really cutting, subtle observations about the role of women in postcolonial African society, but it also kind of makes me want to put it down after five pages and go to sleep. Too bad it’s not actually the bedroom book.

3. Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood. I just started this, but it’s pretty interesting so far. I really like pop nonfiction books about history or science. I’m a little turned off by the personal narrative aspect of this book–the author is a gay man whose partner is HIV-positive, and he’s not–because I prefer reading about the subject at hand rather than the author’s personal odyssey through it. (In Bad Taste was a book I read where the author’s personal narrative kind of ruined it. The author is a food scientist, but not particularly adventurous, worldly, well-informed, or a gifted writer in English, so there’s a lot of him going “People eat really weird stuff! Can you believe this? I couldn’t believe it. I was scared to eat it. But I ate it anyway. Then we went shopping and this is what I bought. It’s a good thing, too because I only packed long pants and it turned out to be unexpectedly hot blah blah blah”) At the same time, though, it makes sense in this book because the subject is so intimately bound up with the author’s personal life. There’s a scene at the beginning of the book where his partner cuts himself, and when the author rushes to help him, his partner won’t let him near until the author puts on latex gloves to protect himself from the blood.

2. When you think of a good story what are the first 3 books that come to mind?
Here are three that I thought of immediately. All of them are set in historical San Francisco (and environs).
1. Swing: A Mystery. Starts with a woman plummeting to her death from a tower on Treasure Island at the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition, then the mystery goes on from there in an impressively clever and fast-paced period adventure with clues embedded in the jazz music the author wrote for the book (CD included).

2. Carter Beats the Devil. Way better than The Prestige. Sleight-of-hand, fateful love stories, the death of President Warren G. Harding, and gorgeous little cameos from everyone from Philo T. Farnsworth to the Marx Brothers, back when they were doing vaudeville. And I loved all the references to the Bay Area. Carter meets someone very important while walking a lion around Lake Merritt, for example, and his family’s mansion was up in Pacific Heights, where I used to work.

3. Locked Rooms. This is probably not actually my favorite out of the Mary Russell books, I mainly picked it to stay in theme, since it’s set in San Francisco, but the whole series is wonderful. (She’s Sherlock Holmes’s wife, and equally brilliant.) I’m a sucker for any Holmes pastiche, and this is no exception.

3. Which 3 books would you recommend for summer 2008 beach reading?

1. The Beach. It has a beach in it, so it must be good for summer reading, right? Especially the part where they all get food poisoning and people are vomiting and having diarrhea everywhere. This book is one of those ones I don’t remember much about except that it was much more entertaining than I would have expected. I found it for free at a youth hostel or something. I didn’t see the movie.

2. A Tale of Time City. One of my favorite Diana Wynne Jones books, about a girl who gets kidnapped from the WWII children’s evacuation of London into a city that circles outside time. Time City is so imaginative and weird, and I love the mysterious little glimpses into other times, like the Mind Wars.

3. Hot and Heavy, a time-traveling Viking meets Navy SEAL romance novel by Sandra Hill. I am not kidding. I actually read this book, and it really epitomizes fun, fluffy summer reading. I picked it up at the library one day and was fascinated. Let me sum up the plot for you. It’s kind of amazing.

A feisty Viking woman with big boobs time-travels from 1013 A.D. to modern-day Iraq, where she meets a handsome young Navy SEAL with rippling muscles, who’s on a mission to take out a high-value Iraqi target. He thinks she’s the Iraqi’s lover, so they capture her. Then they realize she’s not really an insurgent, they get married in a marriage of convenience (I forget why–green card, maybe?) that they plan to annul later, but what they didn’t count on was the strength of their mutual attraction, due to their both being extremely sexy. So they stay married. Or maybe they get it annulled and get married again. In any case, they wind up together at the end, and have a lot of sex, and then the time-traveling Viking discovers that her Viking relatives have also time-traveled to the present and established families, so she doesn’t have to miss her dead relatives in the past anymore. Also, people in this book say “Hoo-yah!” a lot.

There is an entire series of these time-traveling Viking and Navy SEAL books! There are SO MANY of them. I looked at, like, 10 of them trying to figure out which one it was I had read, and I hate to think what my Amazon recommendations are going to look like next time I log on. Here are some others you might enjoy: The Very Virile Viking. My Fair Viking. Truly, Madly, Viking.

4. Any knitting book(s) you care to share?
I just got Knitalong, by Larissa Brown, from the library today, and it has a lot of great patterns in it. The Meathead hat is cute, though I’d like to know why it’s named that, The Pillow of Sei Shonagon is a thing that makes one’s heart beat faster, and I have an inordinate fondness for Adrian’s Entomology Mittens and Hat. Those are just a few of the lovely patterns–there are also felted peace cranes, a felted bird’s nest, a beautiful leaf scarf, and a feather and fan baby bonnet, among other things, and those are just the things I enjoyed from looking at the pictures; I haven’t even gotten to reading any of the writing about the book’s main subject, knitalongs.

So I have to tag three knitters for this meme now. I hope they all have recommendations as good as Truly, Madly, Viking.

How about:

1. Macoco
2. Erqsome
3. Fluffbuff

And anyone else who wants to do this meme, consider yourself tagged! I know a lot of you have good taste in books, so I’m going to be keeping an eye on your blogs for some good summer reading recommendations.

Oh. Deer!

Add this to today’s list of Things I Love:

Earlier today, around 2 PM, I was sitting at the kitchen table, working, when out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a horse galloping through our suburban subdivision. I looked up, startled, and saw this:

A herd of deer! About seven of them. I grabbed my camera just before they ran out of sight, and snapped these pictures from the dining room window. I ran downstairs and caught the deer standing in the yard beside someone’s house:

They ran off, but I was too slow this time to see where they went.

(I’d probably love it a lot less if I had a yard of my own. Can you imagine the damage those guys could do to a vegetable garden?)

The good old days

Sometimes I really hate the internet. What happened to the good old days when I used to make plain-text web pages in pico and read webpages using Lynx? Rahul has been bugging me for a while to set up my own site, which seemed like a good idea, but I spent ages yesterday looking through hosting plans and trying to buy a domain name (featherandfan.com; I finally managed, though GoDaddy’s site is the busiest, most hideous piece of garbage I’ve seen in a long time).

I do like using WordPress, so I’m thinking of switching to a self-hosted installation of WordPress. Does anyone have words of advice for me, or recommendations for a good web host? I have no idea how many GB of bandwidth I use or how much storage I would need–since my photos are hosted on Flickr, I assume not that much, but maybe I’m overlooking something here. And what about backups? I don’t like the idea of having to back things up manually.

I want:

• no setup fee
• short contract period or monthly billing (since I don’t know what tier of hosting I need, and would like a trial period with any provider to see if I like working with them)
• cheap rates, preferably under $10 a month
• clean, easy-to-use interface (for example, I loved the site design of asmallorange.com, recommended on Ravelry by HelloYarn, but it seems like you they don’t give you as much for your money as other hosts)
• reliable

Rahul hosts stuff on nearlyfreespeech.net, but they have a weird pay-as-you-go system and I would prefer for my site not to go down if someone links to me and I run out of bandwidth money in my account. Maybe this is not a big risk, really, but it seems like they’re more catering to people with small sites that don’t get a lot of regular visitors. I don’t get a ton of regular visitors (yet! hope springs eternal) but would like to, so having to refill my account balance all the time seems like a hassle…

Also, PayPal. Ugh. I don’t know if I should upgrade my account to Premier right now or not. I probably will have to eventually, but my year ends in June, apparently, so I can receive 5 more credit card payments before then. How am I supposed to know if it would come out better for me financially to upgrade now or later? I have to guess how many credit card payments I’ll be getting between now and June and in what ratio to funded payments?

Stupid internets.

Here are some things that make me happy, though, in the interest of keeping things positive or at least neutral, on balance.

• Kroger’s house brand of organic ketchup. Way better than any other ketchup I’ve ever tried. (This Malcolm Gladwell article has some really interesting things to say about ketchup, by the way.)
• A new cafe in Bloomington called The Pour House. All proceeds and tips go to charity. It’s right on Kirkwood, across from the library, and has a fireplace, couches, wi-fi, and is generally clean, well-lit, and comfortable.
• This new reversible scarf pattern I’m working on, tentatively called The Water Is Wide, knit up in Malabrigo Silky Merino in Indiecita. The colors look kind of weird in these photos, but it’s really quite pretty–lavender, slate blue, teal, pale yellow, rose, mint green, all mixed together, but with similar color values, so the yarn doesn’t read as too variegated or blotchy. I don’t know if I’ll have enough yarn to make this scarf decent-sized, actually–I have 300 yards, but the pattern is kind of a yarn eater.
  I really didn’t mean to cast on for a new project, but inspiration struck while I was in the shower and I ended up making a couple of swatches. I can’t decide what other yarn to knit it up in–I kind of want to do Patons SWS in Natural Denim, but I also kind of feel like I should use something I already have in my stash.
  • One side of the scarf
    
  • The other side (I think it will look better once it’s blocked)
    
• Hulu. I’ve been addicted to Bones, in particular. I just wish they would buffer content when you have the video paused, since my internet connection sucks sometimes and it makes it choppy as hell to watch.
• Tiny baby tortoises!

Also, final note. someone on Ravelry wanted to know what Prickle looks like from behind. Here it is, in case you were wondering too:

A prickle of porcupines

I’ve finally published the pattern for Prickle, just a week under the wire for Malabrigo March. I thought I’d have enough time to do another scarf pattern, too, but it’s just not going to happen in the next week. No time!

You can see the extended pattern description and lots of pictures on the pattern page. The pattern is $4 and can be purchased through Ravelry downloads (preferred) or through Payloadz, if you don’t have a Ravelry account.

Here’s my test knitter Deb’s version, with the lace edging, knit in one skein of Malabrigo merino worsted in Fucsia (sic; I’m spelling it the way Malabrigo does on their site). That scenic waterfront vista, if you can believe it, is the scene outside her LYS in British Columbia, and sometimes they see orcas in the harbor. We need more orcas in Indiana, if you ask me.

The short version of the description is this: Prickle is a moebius cowl in a reversible Porcupine Lace stitch, designed to use less than 100 g/220 yards of worsted-weight yarn, and finished with a sideways knit-on edging. Two edging variations are provided: a plain garter stitch edging, or a frilly, scalloped lace edging (as shown above).

It’s been interesting to me to see the differences in the same pattern in different yarns. I knit the two pattern variations in three different yarns: Malabrigo Merino Worsted in Red Mahogany, Noro Silk Garden in color 269 (with a stripe of white Plymouth Baby Alpaca Brush), and Berroco Ultra Alpaca in Lavender Mix.

Each yarn has its pros and cons, and plays certain features of the pattern up or down by its color and nature:

I think Silk Garden is the attention-grabbing yarn of the bunch. I’d like to see how this pattern comes out in a brighter colorway. The stripes really play up the bands of stockinette and reverse stockinette lace and the gentle, undulating waves of the Porcupine Stitch pattern. I took it off and threw it on the floor near the hamper the other night, and the next day paused to admire the way the creamy, natural colors looked against the beige carpet. Even framed by dirty socks and piles of books, it’s striking, sculptural.

I really designed the pattern for Malabrigo, and the feel of this yarn is the most soft and luxurious of the three versions. My everyday scarf is partly knit from Northampton, a workhorse wool, which, while not scratchy, is not really a sensual pleasure to wear. When I wear the Malabrigo Prickle, I am constantly surprised and distracted by the sheer delicious softness of the yarn when I turn my head and my cheek or neck brushes against the cowl. This is the Calgon of yarns. Malabrigo, take me away!

The interesting thing about Malabrigo is that it has more body and more memory than the other yarns. (I guess that’s something you can reasonably expect from a merino wool as opposed to a silk and mohair or alpaca blend.) It was the only one of the three versions that didn’t feel right when pulled up over my hair like a hood or wimple–not enough drape, not enough stretch.

I think the semi-solid colorway of Red Mahogany gives it a really pretty, organic look when combined with the stitch patterns–like shelf fungus, if that doesn’t sound too gross. The shapes of the individual lace repeats are obscured by this colorway, but Malabrigo (like other hand-dyed or kettle-dyed yarns) looks really nice in garter and reverse stockinette stitch–the lace alternates between stockinette-based and reverse stockinette-based bands, and the edging is garter stitch.

The Ultra Alpaca is the plainest (the only one of the trifecta that nobody has favorited on Ravelry) but its worsted spin and plied construction give it wonderful stitch definition for lace, and the colors are great. I’m really impressed with it. I’m not going to double-post the overhead picture from yesterday, but it’s one of my favorites; taken in bright sunlight on a white backdrop, you can really see the intricate, dimensional curves of the stitches and the interesting shadows they cast. Aside from porcupine paws, the spiky stockinette parts remind me of flowers, or maybe agave plants.

So that’s that. I keep wanting to cast on more of these to see what happens in different yarns (I was thisclose to making one more in Patons SWS in Natural Earth) but I’m going to have to put this pattern down for a bit and work on something else.

…

Brief joke interlude: (from Mental Floss’s finalists for Best Pun in the World):Q: What do you get after playing the lute for 10 hours straight?

A: Minstrel cramps.

…

Kalani alerted me to the fact that Knit Picks has posted a bunch of new yarns. The ones I’m most excited about (but go look at the page for yourself–there are plenty of others):

• New colors of Cotlin: Glacier, Kohlrabi, and Coffee are my favorites
• Gloss lace yarn. The photos seem a little flash-heavy, but I think Cypress seems like a really pretty color.
• Comfy, a cotton/acrylic blend. I’m really curious to see how light and stretchy this is. When they say it has “elasticity,” is it stretchy along the lines of Rowan Calmer, or more like Lion Brand Cotton-Ease? I love the muted colors.
• New colors of Gloss Sock. These are beautiful–Cosmos in particular looks wonderfully moody and smoky
• New colors of Shine Sport. I’ve been looking unsuccessfully for appropriate yarn for the Somewhat Cowl for approximately forever. Could Shine Sport in Fedora be the holy grail? I’m not going to bet on it, but there’s a possibility. I am so thrilled with all these new dark-chocolate browns and murky purples in KP yarns.

Islands are forever

So the Islands show was amazing. We stood up in the front and, unlike on St. Patrick’s day, there was minimal moshing and we were able to relax and enjoy it all. There was a very drunk or stoned girl nearby who kept stumbling into me and yelling things. I think maybe the best thing she said was when she turned to her boyfriend and said, “Oh my God, look, two little Asian guys on stage, darlin’!”

The band came out looking appropriately 2000s-indie-rock, all wearing all-black, with skintight jeans and ridiculously 80s giant velcro shoes, and the lead singer, Nick Diamonds, had some kind of weird white face paint thing going on. They were fun, on key, had tons of energy, sang a good mixture of old and new songs, and the best part of all was when they did their encore: they pulled people up on stage to sing and dance along to “Rough Gem,” one of my favorites. So we jumped on stage and danced and sang, and all in all it was a great evening.

Last night was also the second night this week I came home drenched in beer. Not from Rhino’s, which is an all-ages club; we went to Yogi’s afterwards and had drinks with business school friends. At one point, a very drunk and upset girl stormed over and started screaming at my friend Joseah that he was an asshole. (He was talking to her earlier but wouldn’t tell us what he had said.) When the people gathered around didn’t pay enough attention to her, and raised their glasses for a toast, she shoved them, sloshing beer all over me and breaking someone’s shot glass. She spent the rest of the night alternately crying by herself and extracting attention and drinks from various men around the bar. Good times. The victim of the enbeering was my Sunrise Circle jacket this time (last time, a store-bought cashmere sweater). Sigh.

So I finished knitting my third version of this moebius cowl pattern I’ve been working on, called Prickle, and I’m going to release it for sale on Ravelry soon. I will be surprised if there’s any huge demand for it, but I want to test out the pattern sales feature with something small first. With any luck, I will make enough money off it at some point to cover the cost of the yarn I used to test knit it…

Here are some photos of the three versions. Each takes less than 220 yards of worsted-weight yarn. The pattern is a moebius strip (a one-sided figure) cast on at the equator and knit outwards in both directions in a reversible lace pattern, with a sideways, knit-on edging to bind off–two variations provided, a lace edging and a garter stitch edging:

A lavender version with lace edging, in Berroco Ultra Alpaca in Lavender Mix:

A red version with garter stitch edging, in Malabrigo Merino Worsted in Red Mahogany:

A white version with garter stitch edging, in Noro Silk Garden in 269 (natural):

Wish me luck!

A Very Plain Hat and Aviary Ghost

As promised, I posted the pattern for the hat I made Rahul to keep him warm in Madison. It’s not going to win any awards for originality, but here it is: A Very Plain Hat. All the jabber about the pattern is on the page.

A standard 2×2 rib and stockinette watchcap, it’s not an interesting pattern to knit, but it’s fast, easy, and warm, and its very plain and boring nature means that Rahul actually wants to wear it. I’m sure I’m not the only knitter making clothing for men who complain about garments with any unnecessary adornments, such as color or texture.

Rahul didn’t want his picture taken this morning, so I ended up with a lot of photos like this:



And my personal favorite:

Pattern: A Very Plain Hat

Yarn used: Berroco Ultra Alpaca, 6245 Pitch Black, a little less than 1 skein

Needles used: US size 8/5 mm 16″ circular needles

Date started: March 13, 2008

Date finished: March 13, 2008

Notes:This is a watchcap with a 2×2 ribbed brim knit single-stranded and the rest of the hat knit in stockinette, double-stranded. I was thinking about doing the whole thing in ribbing, but decided after finishing the brim that stockinette was faster.

I really like Ultra Alpaca. It has a tighter twist than most worsted yarns I’ve worked with, sort of like a heavier, fuzzier version of Koigu/Louet Gems, and an interesting dry, soft hand. It worked up really nicely double-stranded on 8s, making a thick, warm, cozy fabric without being too hard to knit at that gauge.

It’s pretty affordable, at around $8.50 per 100 g skein, and it comes in some beautiful heathers. I just made one other thing from it (pictures coming soon!) in a lovely lavender heather.

The wool gives it a good amount of memory, so it doesn’t flop and sag like pure alpaca would, and the alpaca gives it a soft, luscious halo, which you may or may not be able to see in the picture below. Despite the halo, it still has pretty good stitch definition.

We’re having a very musical week–we went to see the Fauxges on Monday, we saw an awesome show by our friends Steve and Charlie’s band Aviary Ghost last night, and tonight we’re going to see Islands at Rhino’s. (Their songs “Don’t Call Me Whitney, Bobby” and “Rough Gem” are my favorites.)

Unfortunately, going to the Islands show means we’re going to miss Steve and Charlie playing live tonight on the local radio station, WIUX. You should all tune in at 9 PM and listen… 99.1 FM for Bloomingtonians, or there’s streaming audio at wiux.org for non-Bloomingtonians. Or just go to the Aviary Ghost website and give their songs a listen (“Somewhere Else” is my favorite). Then buy a CD, because I want them to become rock stars and live off their art. And I want being mentioned on my blog to be the new Colbert Bump.

I’ve read a few interesting blog posts celebrating Messy Tuesday, a reaction against the tyranny of the perfect, clean house featured in housekeeping magazines and domestic-life blogs. I don’t know if I can truly celebrate my messes, because despite my overwhelming messiness I do enjoy it when things around here are clean, but I really appreciate the new ways to look at mess… dirty dishes as memories of pleasure, dust bunnies as choices made to pursue enjoyable (non-cleaning) activities, piles of paper as dynamic workspaces in flux. I’ll think about it a bit more and perhaps I will have something new and interesting to say about cleanliness, and lack thereof, next Messy Tuesday.

Badgering

I had a very traditionally American St. Patrick’s Day yesterday: we went down to Uncle Fester’s on Kirkwood and watched a Thin Lizzy tribute band and a Pogues tribute band called the Fauxges. We drank green beer because it was half the price of any other beer. I wore a green cashmere sweater and danced. Then some dudes in the front decided that they really wanted to mosh, so I wound up covered in green beer and standing in the back of the room so I wouldn’t get knocked over into the dirty green beer puddles on the floor or accidentally get Rahul’s MP3 player wet. Very traditional. At least the sweater was green too. And they closed their set with “Fairytale of New York,” complete with impromptu confetti snow from the balconies, so I was pleased.

So I think I mentioned that we spent the end of last week and the weekend in Madison, Wisconsin and Chicago, scoping it out. It seems likely that we’ll end up in Madison. Unfortunately, UW seemed like a much better fit for Rahul than IU–they’re small, they have an emphasis on nontraditional, innovative research, they have a broad range of good professors should he change his mind about what to study, and one of the top consumer culture theory researchers in the field works there. I say “unfortunately” because despite my best hopes, Madison didn’t strike me with the same kind of instant love that Bloomington did (despite the golf ball-sized hailstones and tornado I encountered in my first few hours in Bloomington).

It’s a much bigger town. A city. When I saw the Capitol Square on the map, I was hoping for a small, charming town square along the lines of the Courthouse Square. It’s more like the San Francisco Civic Center–too big to be a nice place to hang out. The streets are wide and full of traffic.

I just never got a truly homey feeling from any neighborhoods there. I suppose that might change if I have friends there, or during a more photogenic time of year. There was so much snow! (I hear it hasn’t snowed this much in a hundred years, though, so it’s not typical). It didn’t snow while we were there, but there were many uninspiringly huge snowdrifts piled around the streets, with bicycles or cigarette butts embedded in them. Here is Rahul, standing next to a relatively small example.
And people were skating around on the frozen lake.

However, on the plus side, we talked to someone in the business school who had lived in Bloomington for 6 years before coming to Madison for his Ph.D., and he said that overall, he liked Madison somewhat better. I can see his points–there are tons more restaurants and stores in town, including a Trader Joe’s, a really stupendously large bookstore and a shop that specializes in pelmeni, and I’m sure activities on the multiple giant lakes around town are wonderful in the summer. And there is a free zoo! It really lacks the tucked-away, cozy, communal college town feeling of Bloomington, though.

Some highlights from my trip:
- Eating these insanely beautiful sandwiches (chicken curry with almonds and Asian pear with gorgonzola, honey, and sage) at a charming teahouse named Macha, just like our old guinea pig

- Visiting a couple of lovely yarn shops, one with a fabulous coffee house with a view of the water… and I hear there are more in the area, too
- Going to to the Babcock Center to sample dairy products and discovering a new kind of cheese, called juustoleipa, or “Finnish bread cheese”
- Discovering that the golden statue of Wisconsin personified standing on top of the capitol building is apparently wearing a helmet with a badger standing on it. (There were many badgerful details on various buildings around town, which pleased me greatly.)

Here is a photographic series I call “Architectural Treasures of Madison”:
The Gothic tower with crows, and probably people getting beheaded inside.

The Laboratory of Hygiene.

The… what is this?

The business school.

I actually quite liked this carving of Jesus standing in flowers:

I also have a series called “Architectural Treasures of Chicago”:

No, we did not take a field trip to Cabrini-Green. This dilapidated FEMA shack is actually the Metra station at Roosevelt Road, the closest stop of “the worlds [sic] finest commuter rail agency” to Chicago’s world-class Field Museum and Shedd Aquarium. Shameful. I am always embarrassed when people from other countries see what passes as first-class public transportation in the US, and this brings my humiliation to a whole new level. For a minute or two, we actually could not figure out how to leave the station because we didn’t think it was even possible to walk through that boarded-up shack… then we realized that part of the boards could be pushed open. (See the area directly under the hole in the roof, in the picture with Rahul? That’s a “door.” There are two shiny ticket dispensers inside the urine-soaked hovel it leads to.) It all reminded me of those cobbled-together buildings in There Will Be Blood that kept collapsing on people, except with more graffiti and plywood.

We had a great time at the Field Museum, we saw part of the St. Patrick’s Day parade from afar, and much to Rahul’s delight, we ate some deep dish pizza.

We also had to park our car a few blocks away from our hotel, because the Swissotel charged $49 a day for parking, and we also got charged $43 for drinks from the minibar because they are apparently RFID-tagged and detected that we had removed them from the refrigerator for a minute while trying to make room for our leftover pizza. They did reverse the charges, but on top of the 2 hours we spent stuck in stop-and-go traffic on the approach into the city, and the hour we spent on the phone with three different people from Expedia trying to cancel another reservation, it all made for a pretty frustrating trip. Next vacation, I’m going to the middle of the countryside. I’d rather be lost in cornfields than trapped in traffic.

Well, if you’ve made it this far, you might enjoy some knitting content, too. Here is something I made a couple of weeks ago but only just photographed now.

Pattern: Cat Bordhi’s Moebius Cowl

Yarn used: Plymouth Baby Alpaca Brush, color 1000 white, a little more than 1.5 skeins (80 g total)

Needles used: US size 10/6 mm 47″ Addi Turbos

Date started: March 3, 2008

Date finished: March 5, 2008

Mods: I worked 12 reps of the diagonal lace instead of 10, and I bound off by turning the work and working k2, *put 2 sts on left needle, k2tog tbl, k1, rep from *

Notes: This is the second time I’ve made this lovely pattern–the first time, I only had one skein of locally raised worsted-weight alpaca yarn and a little bit of handspun angora, and ran short on yardage, so had to leave out quite a bit of the pattern. I like how large and fluffy this version came out, although it did get slightly too big after blocking–more capelet than cowl. The Baby Alpaca Brush is to die for–super-soft, fluffy, non-itchy.

Oh, and a bonus FO is visible in some of the photos of Madison above–the black hat Rahul is wearing in the photos of the hygiene building and the giant snowbank. Due to the cold, I had to make Rahul a super-fast emergency hat. I’ll write up what I did next time, once I pry the hat from his head and get a chance to measure it. It’s made from one skein of Berroco Ultra Alpaca and is his current favorite, though he wants me to make it longer.

Hourglass

“Most of all, he saw her waist, just where it narrowed, before the skirts spread. . . . He thought of her momentarily as an hour-glass, containing time, which was caught in her like a thread of sand, of stone, of specks of life, of things that had lived and would live. She held his time, she contained his past and his future, both now cramped together, with such ferocity and such gentleness, into this small circumference.”

– A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (You can use Search Inside on the Amazon page linked here to read the whole passage.)

The scene this quote is taken from is quite possibly my favorite passage of all time, in my favorite book of all time. Maybe not–there are plenty of other wonderful books in competition with this one, after all. I have yet to encounter anything that sent chills down my spine quite like this, though. The way the timeline and plot of the entire book swung around this pivotal scene on the beach; the way the symbols, images, and linguistic references fell so neatly into place, like the pieces of an intricate and wonderful puzzle; the way Byatt captures that wonderfully bittersweet feeling of being gloriously happy, but knowing the feeling cannot last.

With that in mind, I bring you the Hourglass Pullover, finished at last.

We walked downtown on Saturday, clad in handknits, and admiring the glistening sculptures of ice-coated bushes here and there, watching squirrels and the first early cardinals searching for food in the melting snow, breaking off icicles from car bumpers and fencing with them before throwing them down on the pavement to shatter.

These photos were taken on the Indiana University campus, which was quiet and peaceful, it being the first weekend of Spring Break. We stopped again, a bit further on, and took pictures of ourselves in front of the Sample Gates, the iconic entrance to campus, at Kirkwood and Indiana.

We enjoyed some of our favorite Bloomington pleasures: going to the public library to get our fix of free books and DVDs, stopping in at the yarn shop and bookstores downtown, having lunch at Roots, the vegetarian restaurant on the square, buying beer and chocolate at Sahara Mart.

While we were at Roots, I spied something interesting across the street–sadly, didn’t get any pictures of it, but it turned out to be a big brown falcon that had caught a pigeon and was perched in a tree outside the courthouse, eating its lunch as we ate ours. It was our second interesting brush with birds that day: I woke up to the sight of two fat, fluffed-up mourning doves perched on my bike basket on the balcony, directly outside the French door to our bedroom.

We saw our friend Jeff on our walk home, just as it started to snow again, and he gave us a ride the rest of the way home. At home, we watched about 20 minutes of The Motorcycle Diaries before switching to a documentary about three-toed sloths (both courtesy of the Monroe County Public Library).

And yesterday, Sunday, we rode our bikes out to run errands in the cold, and later, went to a jalapeno-filled potluck dinner at our friends Steve and Jeanne’s house, with their friend Dan and our friend Charlie, and had drinks and Girl Scout Cookies and played Super Smash Brothers on the Wii (I’m abysmal at it, despite usually liking fighting games).

On balance, we’ve been very happy in Bloomington. We’ve had so many wonderful, simple pleasures to enjoy; our town is peaceful, quiet, small, easy to navigate; best of all, we’ve made great friends here, whom we run into randomly around town, or with whom we can make last-minute plans without the transportation/logistics issues of a larger city. I get to work at home at the moment, doing useful work for a company with wonderful, interesting, intelligent coworkers. It’s been a real pleasure making friends with local knitters through the internet and meeting up every couple of weeks to knit and chat and admire each other’s projects.

It’s been bittersweet, though, because we know it can’t last. Rahul is wrapping up his MBA, and even if we stay in town longer (a possibility, since he’s applied to a Ph.D. program here) it won’t be the same, since our best friends here are all, or almost all, moving away at the end of the year. We’re going up to UW-Madison later this week–another possibility for a place we might be in a few months–hopefully stopping in Chicago to see some museums and/or drink some green beer on the way back. I don’t know where we’ll be in a few months, or what we’ll be doing.

Again from Byatt:

“Let us not think of time.”

“We have reached Faust’s non-plus. We say to every moment ‘Verweile doch, du bist so schoen,’ and if we are not immediately damned, the stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.’”

Here we are, then, in the narrow waist of the hourglass, watching our days slip by, with such ferocity and such gentleness, as the snow melts and spring edges in.

Whatever we do next, I’m sure it will be fine, as well, but I can’t help but look around, and think of how lovely it has been to be here, now.

Pattern: The Hourglass Sweater, from Last Minute Knitted Gifts

Size made: Small (33 inches)

Yarn used: Fleece Artist Blue Face DK, a 100% bluefaced Leicester yarn, in Periwinkle. I bought this on sale–30% off, I think–from Ram Wools. I used perhaps 1.4 skeins of this, or about 700 yards (it comes in a giant put-up, 250 g/450 m)

Needles used: US size 7/4.5 mm and US size 10/6.0 mm circulars

Date started: November 14, 2007 (cast on as an airplane knitting project for my trip back home for Thanksgiving/San Diego)

Date finished: March 3, 2008 (it took me ages! All that stockinette, and the never-ending giant skein of yarn, was disheartening)

Mods: My main modification was the gauge: I got 19 sts and 23 rows to 4 inches, so I had to adjust the number of rows throughout. 7 rounds between body decrease rounds, 11 rounds between body increase rounds; 30 rounds between sleeve decrease rounds, 13 rounds between sleeve increase rounds.

I didn’t adjust the even/decrease rounds in the yoke, but I did work 2 extra sets of decrease/even rounds to reduce the neckline size, winding up with 10 sts at the top of each sleeve instead of 14.

I knit the sleeves first, magic-loop. I used a provisional cast-on for all lower hems, and knit them up into the live stitches. I used a size 10 needle to do this for the sleeves, but forgot to bring it with me when I was knitting up the body hem, so the body hem was knit up with a size 7. My reasoning for this was that the hem always tends to pull in the row of stitches where it’s been knit up, so using a larger needle size would allow for more yarn in that row of stitches, compensating for the additional length the yarn needs to go through the hem stitches in addition to the body stitches. It seemed to work fairly well–you can see in the pictures that it seems like the sleeves have pulled/ruffled less than the lower hem on the body of the sweater.

For the neckline hem, I figured it would be too fiddly and annoying to sew the live stitches down to the body, so I just bound off using *k2tog, place st back on left needle* and then used the long tail from the bind-off to loosely whipstitch the neckline hem down to the inside of the sweater.

Notes:

The pictures above aren’t great, but they’ll do, unless I get the urge to do a new photoshoot.

Check the errata (PDF) for the sweater before you begin. If you follow the directions as written, the increases and decreases won’t stack up on either side of a central stitch, but will migrate to one side or the other.

The yarn did pool quite a bit, and as I’ve mentioned in previous entries, it turns out I’m not crazy about the hand-dyed, variegated aesthetic when it comes to sweaters, but I love this pullover anyway. It’s very comfortable and soft, with a slight shine to it almost like unbrushed mohair, and from what I know about BFL, the yarn will probably wear well, with minimal pilling. I think the overall shape of the sweater–boatneck raglan with waist shaping and bell sleeves–is pretty flattering, and the boatneck is just the right size for me, not too high, so it’s comfortable to wear, and not too low, so it doesn’t slip off my shoulders. Along with the Leaf Lace Pullover, it’s a useful, casual pullover that will make a great addition to my wardrobe.

I started using a new technique to count rows on this sweater. I find it less obtrusive than using a row counter and easier and faster than stopping to write down hash marks on a separate piece of paper–my two other usual techniques for counting rows. (I also sometimes use a row counter made of a piece of waste yarn tied into loops, one for every row I want to count, and move down one loop as I finish each row, but that technique doesn’t work well if you have, say, 10 even rounds to every decrease round, because you need such a long, dangly row counter.) So this method is incredibly simple, but somehow it had never occurred to me before. Here it is:

Counting Rows with Two Stitch Markers

Place one stitch marker at the beginning of the round as usual (the pink pearl marker in the picture below). Now place one more stitch marker next to it. Every time you come to the end of the round, move the second stitch marker (the blue glass/pearl stitch marker in the picture below) one stitch to the left by removing it, knitting one additional stitch, then replacing it. When you’ve completed the appropriate number of even rounds, work your increase or decrease round, remove the second marker altogether, work back to the beginning of the round and place the second stitch marker back in its starting position next to the first one. To figure out which round you’re on, count the number of stitches between the first and second marker. No stitches means you’ve just completed an increase or decrease round and you’re currently on the first even round. One stitch means you’ve completed one even round. And so on. So in the photo below, I have completed 4 rounds even:

I knit one more round and move the second stitch marker to the left: five rounds completed:

And so on. The first marker never moves, and your increases/decreases will still take place around that marker (the pink pearl marker, in this example). And, my demo photo aside, this method of counting will most likely not work if you’re working lace or cables in the zone between the markers. But it’s simple, you don’t have to pause to pick up a pen or fiddle with a dangly row counter, and it works well for plain stockinette.

Harry Potter and the Superdelegates

One of the things I didn’t really like about the Harry Potter books was the way some new rule seemed to be introduced in every book, the way they were constantly discovering some new and hitherto unmentioned facet of magic that was now integral to the plot. It seemed cheap, like J. K. Rowling kept writing herself into corners and then saying “hey! No problem! It’s my world, so I can just tack on some new deus ex machina rule about magic!” Animaguses! (or was it Animagi?) Horcruxes! (Horcruci? Horcruces?) Wandcraft! (Wandcraft!) How is it that the entire plot of the last book hinged on some complicated set of technicalities and legalese loopholes in rules of the universe that weren’t even mentioned until 3000 pages into the series? It all felt exceedingly sloppy.

The thing is, I’m really starting to feel the same way about the American democratic process. It seems like new, obscure rules are being pulled out at every presidential election. Admittedly, I haven’t been able to vote in all that many elections yet, I’ve been paying progressively more and more attention to politics the older I get, and Government and History were never really my strong subjects in school. But it really seems like every four years, some weird new technicality comes up out of nowhere and suddenly becomes crucial to the outcome of the election. Hey, you can win the popular vote and lose the presidency because of the electoral college! Superdelegates will make or break the Democratic nominees! Florida and Michigan held primaries, but, uh, sorry, they don’t count! Once, in single combat, Hillary stole this wand from–oh wait, sorry, different story. I’m just getting kind of tired of it all. Not to mention the possibility of tampering with voting machines, people being turned away at the polls, the voter ID laws that are being called a modern-day poll tax. My friend’s mom said our own elections were starting to seem like the kind Jimmy Carter would have to go and oversee for fairness in a developing nation somewhere.
(By the way, the other thing the wand stuff makes me think of is dog training. And Escape to Chimp Eden. I was reading in this dog book about how according to dogs’ societal rules, possession is 9/10ths of the law, and so if they get distracted and you grab their bone out from under their nose, they have no right to demand it back. I saw the guy on Escape to Chimp Eden do something similar with some oranges and a cannister that squirts puffs of carbon dioxide.)

On some more yarny, less political notes, the first draft of my baby sweater is being test-knit, I finished my long-suffering Hourglass Sweater, I finished a brushed alpaca moebius cowl, I am working on another that I hope to release as a pattern for Malabrigo March, and there are 23 people signed up in the Malabrigo March Prismatic Scarf KAL!

Unfortunately, my camera ran out of batteries, so still no pictures at the moment.

The Hourglass Sweater is incredibly soft and nice, despite its sadly tie-dyed appearance. I’m a big fan of the BFL–it seems like it will wear well because of its staple length, and it has a great lustrous sheen, but it’s also super-soft. After blocking in Eucalan, it was cozy and next-to-skin soft, with not a hint of scratchiness to my (admittedly not super-sensitive) bare skin. It doesn’t have the luxurious, buttery feel of baby alpaca, cashmere, or good merino, but I bet it’s also a lot more durable than those fibers. Great stuff.